Outage cuts cell phone service in Argentina

Buenos Aires, April 3 (IANS/EFE) An outage left about 16 million customers of Spanish telecom company Movistar without cellular phone service Monday in Argentina, sparking protests on social-networking sites.

The company is dealing with “an issue reported at a general level with the data, voice and SMS (text messaging) network” and is working to “fix it as soon as possible”, Movistar, a unit of Spanish telecom giant Telefonica, said in a Twitter posting.

Some 50 million cell phones are in service in the Argentine market, or about 10 million more units than the country has people.